Generating rising prosperity for middle-income households is now seen as a fundamental challenge for rich countries: when countries with similar institutional settings are grouped together, can a best-performing model in those terms be identified? This paper investigate how countries, and models...

Divergence between the evolution of GDP per capita and the income of a 'typical' household as measured in household surveys is giving rise to a range of serious concerns, especially in the USA. This paper investigates the extent of that divergence and the factors that contribute to it across 27...

Ireland is one of the countries most severely affected by the Great Recession. National income fell by more than 10 per cent between 2007 and 2012, as a result of the bursting of a remarkable property bubble, an exceptionally severe banking crisis, and deep fiscal adjustment. This paper examines...

Between 2009 and 2011, data were collected under the first wave of The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). Over 8,500 people aged 50 and over and living in Ireland were interviewed on a wide range of topics covering socioeconomic and health issues. Our primary goals in this paper are (a)...

This paper focuses on the role of minimum wages, tax and benefit policies in protecting workers against financial poverty, covering 21 European countries with a national minimum wage and three US States (New Jersey, Nebraska and Texas). It is shown that only for single persons and only in a...

In this paper we seek to make use of the newly available Irish component of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) in order to develop a measure of consistent poverty that overcomes some of the difficulties associated with the original indicators employed as...

In this paper we seek to make use of the newly available Irish component of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) in order to develop a measure of consistent poverty that overcomes some of the difficulties associated with the original indicators employed as...